Nuclear Biosphere

“Animal Agriculture vs. Cowspiracy”

I would like to say thank you to Leprino Foods for taking the ‘high road’ and coming to an agreeable solution to the animal cruelty allegation in their dairy food chain. I don’t know any more than what I have read in the paper and I am not going to make any personal observation beyond that. In my book, the issue has been taken care of with a reasonable solution. Even Chipotle’s Food took action last week by also taking the high road by improving methods of sourcing sustainable meat.

Several months ago I watched a documentary about animal agriculture and the impact it has on the environment. The original premise of the documentary was to show how much energy was used to process these factory animals from birth to the table. The final conclusion at the end of the documentary was that we should stop raising animals for food, because it was the major contributor to climate change. Some people just take this Throw Back Thursday thing just a little too far. Can you imagine Roswell without its restaurants, especially all our great Mexican foods? No pulled pork, no beef, no chicken and, OMG, no brisket. No disrespect for vegans, but where’s the beef?

After reading the Leprino article, I decide to review the documentary again to see how the information in the video compares to the way our own dairy industry operates. Several points made in the film were:

In 2006, UN Report stated that cows produce more GHG than the entire transportation sector.

Animal agriculture is responsible for 51% of all GHG.

Animal agriculture is the world largest consumer of water resources.

One hamburger required 660 gal of water through its processing chain.

One gal of milk takes 1000 gal of water to produce.

Environmentalists don’t want to talk about the impact of animal agriculture.

Government agencies are ignoring the impact of animal agriculture.

Oh hell, lets just summaries it without doing the math, animal agriculture is causing the sixth mass extinction on earth while feeding all the people.

Is this just udder nonsense or is there a better way to feed the people? Unfortunately, the scientific and mathematically ignorant get hooked, line and sinker. However, for the newer generation of folks, one sound byte only needs a few seconds on the internet to become a truism, without actually being true. Many times, that disinformation never goes away. Case in point: nuclear for me.

The director of the documentary suggested a world without animal agriculture would solve all the climate change concerns? I can’t even fathom that thought and I find it very naïve to even say it, much less make a 90 minute documentary about it. But hey, I read the comments at the video site and people are buying into it and becoming vegan. Animal agriculture, like fossil fuels are not going away, so what we should be doing is finding rational solutions to minimize their impact on the biosphere because the increasing world population isn’t going away either.

One local solution is a centralized manure re-processing center for the dairy farmers where the gases and water are extracted leaving just a lot of rich fertilizer. The methane can be reused as energy for the facility and the extra methane probably sold to the utilities. The water will be cleaned (RO) and returned to the dairy farms. The solids extracted will be re-packaged as sellable fertilizer. I almost forgot, the transportation of the manure will be completely underground through pipes and this should reduce the fly population as well as the stink. So, this article is just food for thought about our good neighbors, the dairy industry.